that commands
respect. He has made an appeal that has moved the hearts of men and women
by its religious note, and hence it is very considerably from the ranks of
Nonconformists with Puritan traditions that the Independent Labour Party
has been recruited. Mr. Hardie is now fifty-five years of age. He has never
been afraid of making mistakes, and he has never sought the applause of
men. He has succeeded in arousing large numbers of people from a passive
allegiance to the party governments of Liberals and Conservatives, and
constrained them to march under a Labour banner at political contests.
Whether the Labour Party in Parliament will remain a separate organisation
or will steadily become merged in the Liberal Party, forming perhaps a
definite left wing of that party: whether a sufficiently large number of
voters will ever be found to make the Labour Party anything more than a
group in Parliament: and whether the Independent Labour movement is not
passing as Robert Owen's socialist movement and as the Chartist movement
passed away in the middle of the nineteenth century, are questions that are
yet to be answered. Democracy will go its own way in spite of the prophets.
In any case, the work of Mr. Keir Hardie has been fruitful and valuable.
For it has made for a quickened intelligence, and a more exalted view of
human life amongst the working people; and it has increased the sense of
personal and civic responsibility. It has made for civilisation, in fact,
and it has insisted on the importance of things that democracy can only
forget to its own destruction.

The third distinguished working-class leader in Parliament is Mr. J. Ramsay
MacDonald, the elected leader of the Labour Party, and its secretary since
its formation. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald is for the working class, but, though
born of labouring people, and educated in a Scotch board school, has long
ceased to be of them. Never a workman, and never associated with the
workman's trade union, Mr. MacDonald went from school teaching to
journalism and to a political private secretaryship, and so settled down
quickly into the habits and customs of the ruling middle class. Marriage
united him still more closely with the middle class, and strengthened his
position by removing all fear of poverty, and providing opportunities for
travel.

From the first Mr. MacDonald's political life has been directed clearly to
one end--the assumption of power to be used for the social improvem